From a technical zone to a landscape
New York sports hub: a park with its own identity which, until today, had never existed in New York. In contrary to Manhattan’s waterfront, a high dense district full of residential high rises and offices, to Brooklyn’s Waterfront and to a part of Queens, where lots are occupied by private operations and narrow parks, the new sports park in West Queens will represent a new space of sociability around sport and well-being
Taking advantage if its potentials, the site’s strategic location will recreate, through the project, a connection between the Queens and the East River. The strategy is summarized by the preservation of the void in a context of strong real estate pressure and the creation of collective programs and public facilities, in a neighborhood where the real estate programs are closed on themselves.
In relation to New York’s large scale, such as the very famous Central Park and the Riverside Park that plays with the infrastructure, this sports park is perceived as one territorial unit. An experimental program combining sports activities with others, which revolve around leisure and communal facilities, creating a network of equipment serving the land. The dynamics of this island-park is the requalification of the great structure of western Queens. All along the park, the adjoining structures will mutate into mixed office, residential and commercial buildings that host café-restaurants, creating a vibrant atmosphere in western Queens.
This project is searching for an effective connection between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island from the extension of the cableway. Improving the transportation infrastructure favors the openness of West Queens to the public. This extension is realized through the Hub by hosting the connection with the cableway, a multi-sports complex pole, a health and well-being pole, and a parking. This program will introduce a new young spirit in a previously inaccessible trench of the city, which today represents an empty and forgotten space.
The Queens is today an urban experimentation space in which the city serves as a laboratory in order to test diverse theories, with an intention of reinventing a contemporary lifestyle. This territory of intervention must protect the inhabitants of the private operations that occupy the Brooklyn Waterfront and which now start a part of Long Island City in Queens.
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